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Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

I'm thinking of this as a temporary hysteria. Nothing much you can do to reason with hysterical people. The only thing that sometimes works for hysteria is a good slap in the face.

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It is temporary hysteria. Remember 'swine flu'? The infection fatality rate ended up being like 10x better than what the media initially reported.

Do you remember swine flu? The media storm died down as experts gathered more information and made recommendations. Note how with Covid19, the information has changed over time, but not enough to change expert recommendations, which have remained fairly consistent.

No it's not, the infection fatality rate keeps going down. This is just media hype and the risks are being overblown due to the many biases in human judgment (availabiltiy bias, survivorship bias, social bias, etc).

> No it's not, the infection fatality rate keeps going down.

Which is why I didn't say the infection fatality rate is staying the same.

Does that even matter? If the best estimate of fataility rate is what it is now, surely that is what any response should be based on. The media is reporting various figures from scientists, not making them up. If you don't calibrate your response based on such figures, what do you calibrate it based on? A gut feeling that everything will probably be fine?

No, the media tends to report the most sensationalized numbers, not the most accurate numbers. I rely on World Health Organization type stuff, not "the news".

The same WHO that Trump just defunded for spreading “all sorts of false information about misinformation and mortality”?

yes, the same one.

I think it is not so clear that they are any more reliable than other sources. The media in the UK seems to have been candid about the low risk to younger people, but that's not the point is it? The governmental responses at least in the UK and US changed as it became clear it was more serious than we (or they, at least) thought, not less [1]. And this became quite apparent when it started occurring on the ground in Italy.

>We are going to get hyperinflation now, US dollars will become worthless soon

Now that, is sensationalism.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/16764a22-69ca-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...

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